HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- If Ricky J Taylor is playing his Martin acoustic and singing around
the house, his 7-year-old daughter Emily, who is hearing impaired, will
sheepishly wander into the room with her little toy guitar.

"She'll start strumming along, not
making any particular chords," Taylor, who is based in Huntsville, says. "And she
can do it in perfect rhythm too, and has the biggest smile on her face."

On Aug. 3, Taylor and his band will play a 7:30 p.m. album release
show celebrating his new LP of bluegrass-informed material, "A Journey to Here,"
at Straight to Ale Brewing (3200 Leeman Ferry Road). A portion of the proceeds
from the $10 admission will benefit the Huntsville Pediatric Audiology.

"It's a clinic that my daughter relies on," Taylor, 54, explains.

In 2006, Emily was born prematurely and spent three months
in the neonatal ICU.

"One of the consequences of that prematurity was hearing
loss," Taylor says. "She ended up having a Cochlear implant at 2-years-old. It's
given her some basic, rudimentary ability to hear, but she requires a
considerable amount of auditory therapy to progress, and this clinic is key to
her progress.

"Many places that provide these kinds of services, they're
low on funding. The technicians and the audiologists and such that work there
are routinely donating from their own pockets. I just wanted to help out."

You are 'Here'

Asked about the album title "A Journey to Here," Taylor says,
"There are two reasons for that. To borrow a term from The Beatles, it refers
to the long and winding road. And secondly, it refers to the content. The songs
themselves are somewhat introspective, and, even thought it might not be so
quite overtly clear, a lot of them have a lot of my personal experiences."

Pops was tops

Growing up, Taylor's musical idol was his father, JB Taylor.
"He's now 76 years old, and is still going at it. He's a bluegrasser. And I
wanted to play and sing simply to be like Daddy."

We're number one

Growing up in Kentucky, by high school Rick was playing bass
in the bluegrass band Cross Country, which also included Mike Snider, now a
Grand Ole Opry member, and won first place in 18 of 22 band contests they
played across the Southeast, Rick says.

So what was the most memorable prize from those winnings?

"It was pride. We made some money, but it was pure and
simple the pride of winning. In Tennessee, there are lots of good bluegrass
bands, and we won the Tennessee state championship twice. The first one was in
Memphis, and I remember jumping straight up out of my seat when they
announced we'd won first place. Probably my first taste of a team-sport type
victory. It was pretty cool."

Loud silence

"This is going to sound strange, but I really don't listen to
music very much," Rick says. "Music to me is a first-hand experience. I play it, make attempts
to write it. And when I'm listening to music, it's because I'm playing it."

If you want blood ...

The opening track on "A Journey to
Here" is the haunting, pub-folk tune "Ghost of Rory O'Moore." "He was an Irish patriot,"
Rick says of O'Moore. "I was reading a letter that Oliver Cromwell had written
to the heads of England in the 1600s and it was documenting his successful
invasion of Drogheda, a town in Ireland. The song is essentially based on the
battle and some lines come directly from Cromwell's letter. And in the Southern
tradition of writing songs that are about death and misery and suffering, I
thought, 'Well, that seems to fit right in.'"